Hockey Cards: Collecting the Game We Love

Hockey has been around for what seems like forever.   The league was organized in 1917 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada after the suspension of operations of its predecessor organization, the National Hockey Association (NHA), which had been founded in 1909. It started with four teams and, through a series of expansions, contractions, and relocations, the league is now composed of 30 teams active franchises.   As Canadians, we’re proud to say that hockey is our game, it originated in Canada and has a rich history and people feel a special passion for it.   If you are Canadian chances are you have a favorite team, and if you do, chances are that team is one of the remaining six teams residing in Canada.  Your team is a team that is cheered for through the good times and the bad.  As hockey fans, we take pride in our teams and many of us enjoy the hobby of hockey memorabilia collecting.  One prominent collecting item is the hockey card.   The hard core hockey fans who enjoy hockey card collecting has seen many changes in the industry from the early days of Parkie collecting, to present times which features the hockey hobby box.

In today’s hockey card market, we see several different brands featuring a huge range of different types of cards.  If you look at the market from the hockey hobby box perspective and not by the pack, we see product prices which range from twenty dollars all the way to eight and nine hundred dollars.  We see the basic principles of supply and demand at play in today’s market.   Cheaper products seem to have a much larger production run, while expensive products have limited production.   As a diehard collector, the thrill of getting a rare card out of a box is something that can’t be explained through words.  Every day we see collectors posting online in blogs and forums about the special rare card that they pulled from a hockey box.   Through rare cards we achieve great value in what we attained.  Camp and monetary values can be found in hockey cards.

You may ask why card companies bother to produce the low end products which feature little to no value to the seasoned collector.  The key word there is seasoned.   We all remember being children and collecting those cheap hockey cards for the thrill of the hobby.  This is still alive in children in today’s market.   Companies realize how much hockey cards can mean to a child.  This is why we see hockey card packs for sale still at our local corner store.   Today’s market is set up so that the seasoned collector can enjoy buying limited, expensive products and enjoy the rare and special cards attained.  Fortunately, the young can still enjoy pulling that special card from affordable attainable packs.  Young, old, rich, and poor can all join in on the thrill of collecting the cards from our favorite teams in the NHL.

It seems that since hockey had been reborn in the 2005 season, we’ve seen an uptick in hockey card interest.  Remember, the 2004 season never happened.   There was no hockey for over a year.  The new generated interest can be attributed in part to the new young superstars in the league, as well as the fact that we as Canadians really missed the game that we love.   For whatever reasons we have, we love the game of hockey and our hockey cards.  The hockey hobby box lives on and just keeps getting better.